From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Jan 27 2000 - 19:06:56 MST
At 08:39 PM 27/01/00 -0500, Bob Own wrote:
>First, my visual imagination failed in an effort to construct the image of
>a "corpulent" woman whose face was attractive when it swelled.
Just so. Not a pretty sight. (An apotropaic use of `attractive', if I might
put it that way.)
>For
>obscure reasons, I thought of Eugene Ionesco's play, whose title and
>subtitle are:
> THE BALD SOPRANO
Strangely, that play's called The Bald Primadonna over here. Maybe it's
Brit vs. Yank translations?
>Questions: [1] what, specifically, is endangered by this thought?;
Whatever it is that drives many people to invents `souls', I assume; plus,
as I suggested, a perfectly sane defensiveness in the face of what looks
like (a) dehumanising rhetoric that purports to be describing (b) something
that can't exist and hence (c) must have wicked undeclared designs upon us.
Phil Dick's fiction and essays were much concerned with this human vs.
`android' theme, which resulted in powerful surreal fiction but badly
confused ideation, IMHO.
[2]
>what is it in the conscious organization that is viewed as irreconcilable
>with this idea, such that if the unconscious correlate were to gain
>conscious ascendancy, any coexistence would be impossible and the
>current conscious ego-constiuent would be driven into oblivion?
I don't find the background psychodynamics in this formulation all that
convincing, so I can't usefully comment. But clearly something along at
least related lines must be involved. She was *extremely* angry.
Damien
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